Houghton Library, Harvard University

This post is part of an ongoing series featuring items recently cataloged from the Julio Mario Santo Domingo Collection. The Gypsy’s first issue was published in London in 1915 and contained short stories, essays, poems, illustrations, sonnets, and prose. In their foreword the editors of the magazine acknowledged that many people would criticize their endeavor in […]

This post is part of an ongoing series featuring items from the newly acquired Julio Mario Santo Domingo Collection. The publication Bulletin de Police Criminelle was a weekly publication distributed to specific police stations throughout France beginning in 1907. These bound copies come from the Chalon-sur-Saône police station which is located in the Burgundy region of […]

Houghton Library has acquired the archive of French writer, literary theorist, and philosopher Maurice Blanchot (1907-2003) from his daughter, Cidalia Blanchot. Christie McDonald, Smith Professor of French Language and Literature at Harvard University, said, “I am thrilled by Houghton’s acquisition of this important archive. Scholars will have unprecedented access to material that will give us […]

This post is part of an ongoing series featuring items from the newly acquired Julio Mario Santo Domingo Collection. Lewis de Claremont is credited as the author on several occult books from the early 20th-century including Legends of Incense, Herbs, and Oils. The image of an “artist’s conception of Lewis de Claremont in tunic and turban […]

This post is part of an ongoing series featuring items from the newly acquired Julio Mario Santo Domingo Collection. In honor of Halloween I thought we share some creepy images that we found recently in a copy of Vu, a French periodical that covers a range of topics concerning France in the early 20th-century. As the cover […]

This post is part of an ongoing series featuring items from the Julio Mario Santo Domingo collection. William S. Burroughs (1914-1997) looms large among countercultural figures of 20th-century literature. The seminal Naked lunch is a famous source of controversy – it was banned in Boston in 1962, and ultimately redeemed in a 1966 obscenity trial before […]

This post is part of an ongoing series featuring items from the Julio Mario Santo Domingo Collection. This week’s feature is the second of two sculptural volumes: in this case, the binding itself, rather than the enclosure, defies convention. The book, a paperback French biography of Jimi Hendrix published in 1976, is unremarkable in itself. However, […]

This post is part of an ongoing series featuring items from the Julio Mario Santo Domingo Collection. In the course of these posts on the Santo Domingo Collection, numerous fine, extravagant, and perhaps even ostentatious bindings and enclosures have been showcased. This week, we bring you the first of two books that extend past the codex […]

Cataloging work has begun on Harvard College Library’s recently acquired 20,000-strong zines collection. Zines are non-commercial, non-professional and small-circulation publications that their creators produce, publish and either trade or sell themselves. The 600 or so zine titles listed thus far are best described as an eclectic collection of material whose subject matter ranges from personal […]

This post is part of an ongoing series featuring items from the Julio Mario Santo Domingo Collection. Cataloging work is now underway on the complete bibliography of author, psychologist, countercultural guru, and erstwhile Harvard lecturer Timothy Leary. The Leary volumes in the Santo Domingo Collection were previously the collection of Michael Horowitz, Leary’s associate and bibliographer. […]

This post is part of an ongoing series featuring items from the Julio Mario Santo Domingo Collection. We return to the occult in this week’s feature from the Santo Domingo Collection. Today’s author is Austin Osman Spare, an English artist, writer, and occultist active in the first half of the twentieth century. While Spare’s finely-wrought […]

This post is part of an ongoing series featuring items from the newly acquired Santo Domingo collection. Julio Santo Domingo collected books across many forms; among them is the graphic novel. Pictured here is one of the great collaborations in French comics: L’Incal, written by Alejandro Jodorowsky, the Chilean-born French filmmaker, actor, and author, and […]

The heavily annotated books seen here belonged not to a famous mathematician or physicist but to the English literary critic and poet William Empson (1906-1984), best known for his first book, Seven Types of Ambiguity: A Study of its Effects on English Verse (1930), which established Empson, seemingly overnight, as one of the most important […]

This post is part of an ongoing series featuring items from the newly acquired Santo Domingo collection. The depredations of the drug trade are fertile ground for crime and mystery fiction: pulp, in a word. In the Santo Domingo Collection, these lurid works stand on the shelves alongside opium-inspired poetry and countercultural acid narratives. Pictured […]

This post is part of an ongoing series featuring items from the newly acquired Santo Domingo collection. A particularly sumptuous volume from the collection of Gérard Nordmann is today’s Santo Domingo Collection feature. This 1938 publication of Poèmes inédits (Unpublished poems) by Pierre Louÿs was limited to 109 numbered copies; this is copy 5. Louÿs […]

This post is part of an ongoing series featuring items from the newly acquired Santo Domingo collection. The Santo Domingo collection is broad in scope, but its many volumes also accommodate exhaustive collecting of a number of particular authors. Among these is David Gascoyne (1916-2001), the British poet and translator known for his association with […]

This post is part of an ongoing series featuring items from the newly acquired Santo Domingo collection. Interested in learning more about cacti and where they grow? This French publication of Les cactées cultivées could be for you. The volume was published by the Librairie Agricole de la Maison Rustique in 1931 by André Guillaumin, […]

This post is part of an ongoing series featuring items from the newly acquired Santo Domingo collection. Most people picture a chastity belt as a device that looks like iron underwear (complete with a lock) that was meant to keep a woman from having sexual relations. Legend has it that this device was invented during […]

“Charles Olson, 1910-1970: a Centennial Selection from the Ralph Maud Collection,” on exhibit in Houghton Library’s Chaucer case (on the ground floor) since November 3, will be extended through February 7. The exhibition celebrates both the centennial of the birth of this influential American poet, and the 2009 gift to the Houghton of the Ralph […]